Streetscapes/411-423 West 154th Street; A Victorian Row Reflects a Century of Changes

THEIR delicate wooden porches have been sheared off, crusts of roofing tar hide their slate shingles and their round windows have been punched out. But the sagging row of 1884 houses at 411-423 West 154th Street is still one of the more intriguing in Manhattan.

When first built they had ridgetop views far to the south. Those are long gone as the most recent cohort of owners adapts these Victorian structures for a new century.

The row of houses was begun in 1883 by John Kelly, a developer, at the northwest corner of 154th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. His architect, James Stroud, set the houses on a plateau with land dropping away steeply to the south, enhancing what were already commanding views of the city's downtown.

The magazine Building said the interiors of the three-story houses were trimmed with ash and cherry, with tiled fireplaces, built-in rolling wooden blinds and, in the windows, ''glacier decorations,'' a term Ian Evans, an Australian preservation writer, believes is a reference to imitation stained blass.

Stroud designed the facades in the recently fashionable Queen Anne style, a mixture of Victorian and colonial decoration that was a sharp contrast to the uniform brownstone of prior decades. The first stories were enclosed by lacy wooden porches and the third floors were a bewildering array of towers, mansards and gambrel-ends, like a toy railroad town designed by the cartoonist Charles Addams. The houses are set well back from the street, and the steep grade makes for some awkward approaches; the ascent to 411 West 154th is almost two full flights of stairs.

The corner house was later demolished, but the row of seven stretching from 411 to 423 West 154th Street still forms a dramatic group. Early tenants were people like George H. Putnam, who lived at 417 West 154th and was the head of the G. P. Putnam book publishing company (and son of its founder George Palmer Putnam). An advocate of the League of Nations, he wrote widely on copyright law, books, censorship and the Civil War, in which he served on the Union side.

The architect Carl Pfeiffer, who had designed the original Plaza Hotel in 1883, lived in 421 West 154th, and John C. Bliss, pastor of the Washington Heights Presbyterian Church at 155th and Amsterdam, lived at 423. While census records show prosperous households, as time went on they went through typical changes: Albert Pritchett, a toilet articles manufacturer, lived at 411 in 1910 with his wife, son and sister-in-law, but by 1920 his wife. Mary, a widow, remained there with her sister and four unrelated women who rented rooms.

Now there are only outlines of the wooden porches and stairs, and the embankments and front yards have been rebuilt. Most of the projecting window bays have been removed or clad in galvanized iron or aluminum; the oval windows in the top floor mansards have almost all vanished; many of the rivet-head details on the deep red brick have been shorn off.

But most of the slate roofs are intact, the dormer windows have their projecting wooden shades and the brickwork has generally escaped major changes.

Emilio Frederick, a Con Ed engineer, lives with his family at 413 West 154th Street, which he bought in 1983. He had to gut much of the building because it had been damaged by a fire, but he salvaged many of the doors and some woodwork. He took off a two-story high brick porch -- ''I knew that wasn't right'' he says -- and he still wants to recreate a period railing. ''It's a battle of love,'' he says. ''There's always work to do with a 100-year-old house.''

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HIS neighbor, Dennis Derryck, an urban policy professor at the New School University bought 415 West 154th in 1992 with his second wife and their children. ''We moved from 138th off Broadway -- that was becoming a drug den -- and we were looking for something 21 feet wide,'' he says. He and his wife, Dr. Joy Anderson, have a fairly large art collection and, he says, ''wanted a place we could let the light in.'' So they opened up the back of the house to make a double-height space.

Dr. Derryck says that when he moved in he found trophies and photographs from the career of Althea Gibson, the tennis star, and gave them to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Ms. Gibsonsometimes stayed with Moulton and Rhoda Smith, who owned the house before the Derrycks, Dr. Derryck says.

Next door, at 417, Joseph Brown says he was renting a room until a year ago when he bought the house after the owner died. The house still has other roomers, paying him $40 to $85 a week. But he says one tenant hasn't been paying rent for over a year.

''This isn't a business'' he says. ''I'm paying $900 a month in the winter just for oil, and then there's liability insurance and Con Ed, and taxes -- and the city makes it so hard to get them out when they don't pay. But there's a need for housing like this, for people just getting started.''

Mr. Brown now lives in the parlor floor; its intact woodwork and tiled fireplace are still crowded by the medicine cabinets and other elements added for rooming house occupancy, and the construction supplies for his own renovation.

The house at 419 is entirely occupied as a rooming house, and looks ragged -- but the outer door still has its original brass doorknob escutcheons (although no doorknobs) and the vestibule walls have some ancient figured wall covering -- right underneath a hole in the ceiling.

Baron Taylor lives all alone in 421 West 154th Street, but the house is full of his heavy wood antiques, bronze sculpture and artwork. His house is almost completely intact, with its sliding doors and front and back fireplaces. But he had to strip the wood himself after he moved in with his late father about 10 years ago. ''Oh, that was a job.'' he recalls. It's quiet in these houses; the English clock on Mr. Taylor's mantel is the loudest thing a visitor hears.

The last house in the row, 423 West 154th Street, was completely refaced with stone in the 1950's, and is now owned by Monica Braggs. The prior owners had heavily remodeled the parlor floor, and she has enlarged it into a beauty spa. She lives there with four generations: her mother, Rose Aska; her daughter, Shawnee, and son-in-law, Lamar Mays, and their 6-year-old son, Kingsley.

Although it is quite different from the original, the Braggs house also captures the warp and woof of life of the block: The original tile floor in the vestibule butts up against the aluminum door installed by the prior owner, and original woodwork in the hallway contrasts with the ultramodern fittings of her beauty spa. The 1950's kitchen, unchanged down to its dishwasher, has become an artifact in its own right, a historic piece of the modern past in this unusual row.